


In Which Nele Fears For His Captain

by ejokes



Category: Monsters & Other Childish Things (Roleplaying Game), Mrs. Frieda's Halfway Home for Terrible and Freakish Children, The Drunk and The Ugly
Genre: 'brain matter', Blood, Character Death, prose, temporary suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 19:23:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3085268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ejokes/pseuds/ejokes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In practice, the scene takes less than a minute. Scott takes the gun, snarks with the Shopkeeper a bit, shoots himself, and comes back to life. For Nele, I imagine, the whole thing takes much longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Nele Fears For His Captain

Nele didn't want to stay. As soon as the gun appeared in the Shopkeeper's hand he wanted to grab Scott and Emma and drag them out of there. He wanted to leave The Shop, gather everyone together and pray to whatever god would listen that they would be out of this crazy place and back on the road. Maybe they could come back later with something else to trade besides  _parts of themselves_ .

Now, he was fine with giving up his own combat senses. He could survive without them. But Scott? Could he do the same? Someone had already tried to kill him on this trip! His ability was literally his life. His future. And he was giving it away. However, this was Scott’s journey (his family, his discovery, his odyssey, his ship to steer through the storm). Nele wasn’t sure if he even had the right to object to this mockery of a ‘trade’. It was, in the end, Scott’s choice to trade it in, but still, to give away the ability that had saved his life more than once before? Not to mention what could happen if someone else got their hands on it, and what were the chances that the Shopkeeper wasn’t tricking them? Maybe Scott would… demonstrate, and the man would take the power then and there! There were too many variables, too many things that could go wrong, and this was Scott’s _life_ on the line. He… it was _Scott_.

Nele didn't want to watch. Oh, rest assured, death didn’t necessarily _bother_ him. He and death were old friends (the project had made sure of that), and he was rather desensitized to it. Nele had watched his family (and indeed, his own hands) kill many people that he now knew to be innocents, and had even seen a few suicides. Kids who found out who was coming for them and did the deed before the three of them could get there, or sometimes, who froze in the middle of a fight and turned their power or BEM on themselves. He had seen some strange deaths in his time on duty. True, they were now just flashes of memory that he couldn't really see clearly, but he had still seen them. Kids burned alive, corroded by acid, drawn into a black void, drowned, hung, or bled out via slit wrists. He had seen people riddled with bullets, destroyed by grenades, and crushed by falling debris. Sometimes he had wondered if there was a method of death that he hadn’t seen.

But no matter how much he told himself that he had seen death before, or how this would be nothing new to him, no matter how often he mentally repeated that he should be able to brush this off like he had with so many others… he knew that this death - _Scott's_ death - would not be so easily disregarded. He knew that he cared too much - was too invested, too attached, too close to the situation - to completely isolate himself. Even from this _one_ death. This one death that would (probably) not even be permanent. Scott would only be one corpse out of the hundreds he had seen, but still one that he would give the (damned) Shopkeeper anything he asked for to forget.

Scott took the gun. Turned it over in his hands. Examined it. Fiddled with it.

It was an old gun, six chambered. It took a moment for him to open it, fingers shaking. He checked the chambers. Closed it again.

Nele didn't want to remember. Not now. Of all the memories that the Project had seen fit to let him keep, the ones where he was training with his family were some of his most treasured. He held them especially close now that he had remembered Newt, but the shining gem in those memories had been and would always be Nell. The two of them had been inseparable, even when first let out of cryo, and they acted like real twins, one almost never leaving the other’s side. Even when they had been out of the tanks for a while and needed to first start attending separate classes - Nele learning combat early and Nell being pushed into her strategist role - one had always found a way to sneak out and visit the other.

Even though she was technically older than he was, Nele had been the first to be given a gun, and it was him who was charged with helping her learn to shoot during the times when they had free reign of the training centre. She had taken the first gun she had been handed with the same degree of caution as Scott now did. Nele knew how he felt. Holding a gun for the first time was a sobering experience, and he knew that this was that moment for Scott. His face had gone blank, and he didn't look up from the weapon in his hand, its polished surface reflecting the light as he examined it. Nele knew what was running through his head.

'I could kill with this. With this tiny piece of metal, I could maim, torture, kill, destroy a family, ruin a city, and take over a country. All with a tiny ball, this barrel, and a spark.'

Nell had confessed something to him, much, much later. During the short period of time before they climbed into their tanks for the night, when all the lights were turned off and her face had only been illuminated by the glowing vitals guages, she had gripped his arm tightly and stopped him from entering his own restoration chamber. Quickly and quietly, before the handlers could make it down to their row for inspections, Nell told him that when she had touched the gun for the first time, she had briefly wondered what it would have felt like to be shot.

It would have been a simple action. Turn the gun around. Look down the barrel. Twitch the trigger. Would it be quick, she had thought, or would it be a slow burn, spreading outward until she just couldn't take it anymore? Nele hadn't said that he had thought the same thing when he first held a gun, or that he too had confessed to someone. He remembered that Newt had nodded, silent and serious and knowing. All he could do was offer Nell the same, weak comfort that Newt had given him and pull her close, allowing her to use him to anchor herself. Now he saw that Scott was thinking the same as they had, so long ago. Only, for him, Nele thought, death would be a much more pressing thought. The barrel shook as he awkwardly slid his finger under the trigger guard.

Nele didn't want to judge. Scott would be killing himself in a few short moments. That much was clear from his determined expression (Scott would be _killing himself_ ), but as Nele attempted to distance himself from the situation, hating himself for not saying anything (but he trusted Scott) and hating himself for not having more to give (he had nothing to offer), his training took over. Scott's hand gripped the gun too tightly. The recoil would cause him to tense up, and only make his aim worse. His arm and shoulder were vibrating, tendons stretching skin and muscles tensing and relaxing sporadically. For Scott, the shot would pack unexpected power, and if he wanted to shoot more than one target (why was he thinking this? Scott would never have to-) he would need to loosen his muscles. His stance wasn't wide enough, making his centre of balance too high, leaving him vulnerable. His shoulders were lifted, legs locked, face tight, why was he doing this- he didn't need to, Nele would give something else, anything else, he didn't need-

The hammer was drawn back. The barrel placed in Scott's mouth. Removed. One last snarky exchange passed between him and the Shopkeeper. The gun was replaced.

Nele didn't want to analyse. However, the fact remained that probably the last thing he would see with his combat senses was the death of a close friend by their own hand. Time slowed to a crawl as he watched Scott's face tense up. ( _This was saving lives._ ) His eyes squeezed shut and his whole body tensed, including the finger on the trigger. ( _Saving lives. Don't intervene._ ) Nele's world narrowed to the sleek lines of the gun, and his senses told him exactly the angle that the bullet would impact the roof of his mouth, which sections of brain it would shred through. ( _Don't Intervene. Scott will be fine._ ) Nele's mind did calculations without his consent. ( _Scott will be fine._ ) The bullet would crack through Scott's skull and hit a point on the ceiling approximately three point five metric metres behind him. ( _He has to be fine._ )

He would be dead before he hit the floor. ( _Nele had always wondered how people knew what killed someone quickly. Did they test it? How could they get results if no one from the tests was left alive?_ ) He held his breath. ( _How did the shredding of your brain's tissues feel? Did the bullet stimulate any of the sensory regions?_ ) The trigger was pulled. ( _On a scale of one to ten…_ ) The gun recoiled (… _with ten being the longest…_ ), just as he thought it would. (… _and one being the shortest…_ ) With a bang that Nele barely heard (… _how long did you feel it took…_ ) the gun fired. (… _for you to die?_ )

Nele didn't want to stand, frozen, as Scott shot himself.

Nele didn't want to flinch as a spray of dripping, thick, chunky brain matter exited Scott's skull with the bullet. He didn't want to feel the stuff impacting his face and oozing down his right cheek.

Nele didn't want to watch as, even when his combat senses blinked off just as quickly as they had blinked on, Scott seemed to crumple to the ground in slow motion.

Nele didn't want to fear that they had been tricked, and that Scott wouldn't get back up.

But he did. He stayed and watched and remembered and judged. He analysed and froze and flinched and he watched... fuck… he- he watched... he...

He feared.

Oh god... did he fear.

**Author's Note:**

> Any comments? Corrections, no matter how small? Issues or grievances? Feel free to tell me.


End file.
